David L. Hanselman, Jr. is a partner in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery LLP and is based in the Firm’s Chicago office.
David represents clients in a broad range of antitrust and class action lawsuits. He is currently leading a team of lawyers from several McDermott offices in four antitrust class actions pending in federal courts across the United States alleging that hospitals engaged in wage-fixing conspiracies. In one of these cases, Reed v. Advocate Health Care, David devised and implemented a strategy to exclude the testimony of plaintiffs’ expert witness at the class certification stage. The resulting decision, which was the first in the Seventh Circuit to apply the principles of the landmark In re Hydrogen Peroxide decision, denied class certification outright on the ground that the expert’s opinions were so unreliable that they were “essentially inadmissible.” In a similar case, Fleischman v. Albany Medical Center, David twice defeated class certification on the issues of injury-in-fact and damages.
David is also currently defending putative, nationwide class actions by direct and indirect purchasers alleging an antitrust conspiracy among steel producers to restrict the supply of all steel products in the United States. David was also a member of a team of McDermott lawyers that successfully defended one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies in a week-long, preliminary injunction hearing against allegations that its contract for oncology drugs constituted an illegal tying arrangement.
In addition to his antitrust work, David has defended clients in a number of class actions and multidistrict proceedings involving a variety of industries, including pharmaceuticals, consumer products, insurance, managed care and telecommunications. He has obtained dismissals of class actions and defeated motions for class certification. For example, he was a member of the legal team that defeated certification of a putative class of insureds in In re Managed Care Litigation, a federal multidistrict class action in Miami that asserted RICO, ERISA and state law claims against six of the nation’s largest managed care organizations. David played a key role in achieving the outright dismissal of two automobile insurance class action lawsuits, which dismissals were affirmed by the South Carolina Supreme Court. He also represented a leading cellular telephone service provider in In re Wireless Telephone Radio Frequency Emissions Products Liability Litigation, a series of class actions consolidated in federal court in Baltimore alleging that cellular telephones emit unsafe levels of radio frequency radiation.
David has tried cases in both Illinois and Indiana courts. He has helped secure appellate victories for clients in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the Indiana Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Indiana. David also has experience in alternative dispute resolution, having tried two contract disputes before panels of the American Arbitration Association.
As an undergraduate at Harvard College, David played football and was elected president of the student government. At the University of Chicago Law School, David was awarded a Tony Patino Fellowship (a merit scholarship awarded to law students who demonstrate leadership ability and commitment to public service) and a John M. Olin Fellowship for his academic work in law and economics.
David is admitted to practice in Illinois and Indiana and before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fourth and Seventh Circuits and the U.S. District Courts for the Northern District of Illinois, Northern District of Indiana and Southern District of Indiana.
Education
- University of Chicago Law School, J.D. (cum laude), 1998
- Harvard College, A.B. (cum laude), 1995
